I had been looking for an article like this. Thank you. I still have the problem that sql2000 doesn't seem to like to send through Outlook express for instance. Is there a workaround for this or another very minimal other mail client that might work or is there a way to send straight to smtp server? Could there be a followup article about connecting the entire thing together?

Thx for that code David, I might actually change mine ;)...I wanted to avoid cursors, but it was the first thing I could think of..bad habits die hard...

As to Bo's question, I read an article, I can't quite remember where, but someone had an article posted on how to use Outlook Express and Third Party mailers with xp_Sendmail..I'll see if I can find it.

Real Programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write it should be hard to understand.

What about when the email name you are retrieving from a table is no longer valid? Any ideas on error processing?

Can't quite get this part to work properly, or it works okay until the 1st illegal name is encountered then "rolls back". Then retries x number of times (something you define) and then sends the emails out again until that first illegal address is encountered. Wish xp_sendmail had error processing and was documented better.

To make a long story short, if you try to process email addresses in a table within a proc, it can't roll back xp_sendmail operations and if you have set retry option up then you get duplicate emails sent to some humorless people!